Every Netflix Original Movie, Ranked

Which Netflix original movies are worth streaming?
Photo-Illustration: Gluekit

This post was originally published in November 2017. We have updated it with Netflix’s recent offerings.

Netflix has spent the last few years and several billions of dollars on a crusade to be taken more seriously. The online video-streaming platform first got some hair on its virtual chest in September 2013, when it racked up a whopping 14 Emmy nominations in its first year of eligibility, minting House of Cards as a bona fide contender and proving once and for all that computer-native programming was here to stay. Still, though, content head Ted Sarandos felt there was something left to prove. While the evolving service figured out what to do with the pair of serialized hits that had fallen in its lap (Orange Is the New Black had also emerged as must-see programming, despite missing that year’s Emmy cutoff by a nose), Sarandos was casting his gaze on a new, more hostile horizon. TV was Netflix’s lingua franca; the service had always been geared to the smallness and bingeability — a word Netflix ushered into the public lexicon — of the format. Mastering the multiplex, however, would prove a far bitterer ground war.

Since it began branding its logo on original films in 2015, Netflix’s primary goal has been to divorce itself from the “digital dollar bin” reputation it established upon first pivoting from the snail-mail service, now an unsettlingly faint memory, to streaming. It was not so long ago that the service formerly known as “Netflix Instant” well, sucked; it was a repository for direct-to-DVD sequels, little-seen stand-up specials, and candy-colored kiddie cartoons seemingly plucked from Lisa Frank’s more vivid night terrors. And so Sarandos made a dignified selection for his first narrative go on the silver screen: Beasts of No Nation, a movie about child militias in Africa, with a well-pedigreed creative team (Cary Fukunaga was comin’ in hot off his True Detective stint, Idris Elba was a brand-name star) and their according awards potential. It’s a real movie, and by my count, a pretty good one.

The second film they released was the one where a donkey explosively sharts all over Adam Sandler.

Since then, Netflix has bagged an Oscar, elbowed its way into Cannes, and spent more than Panama’s gross national product on content. These days, Netflix is made up of a fair amount of movies that attain mere forgettability instead of outright awfulness. But it’s produced some genuinely good films, as well. Below, we attempt to rank every single Netflix original movie ever made (excluding documentaries, in the interest of this list remaining … bingeable).

141.The Do-OverLet’s start with the most noxious entry in Sandler’s fruitful collaboration with Netflix. David Spade plays a henpecked beta cuck unsatisfied with his pitiful existence, which makes him receptive to an intriguing offer from old buddy Sandler when they meet up at their high-school reunion. A flimsy scheme to reinvent their lives by pinching a pair of dead guys’ identities goes about as poorly as one could reasonably expect, and mostly just cues up tired gags about being tired. That’s the one faintly redemptive feature of this otherwise barren movie: The Sandler filmography gets a rare flash of self-awareness when Spade’s emasculated loser screams, “I’m so tired of women lying to me and fucking me over!” while in a full-on fist fight with yet another “untrustworthy female.”

140. Game Over, Man!What kind of kompromat does Adam DeVine have on Netflix’s board members? There’s no other way to explain how he keeps getting execrable concept comedies pushed into existence as if through a sphincter. In this putrid Die Hard clone, he reunites with his former Workaholics pals to portray a trio of hotel custodians who must disarm a hit squad holding a weirdly cameo-heavy party hostage. (Spoiler alert: Flying Lotus’s head explodes, Scanners-style. Also: Jillian Bell soils herself.) Slathered in gay-panic gags and reaching its nadir with an anilingus set piece that will leave all those who see it emotionally scarred, it’s a heartening sign that the Sandlerian legacy of, ahem, half-assing it will remain intact for years to come.

139. The OutsiderMaybe you already know this film as “the Jared Leto yakuza Netflix movie.” Maybe you’re friends with one of the critics who were contractually obligated to review it, and consoled them as they rocked back and forth while babbling that they thought The Last Samurai couldn’t get any whiter. Maybe you saw the ads, depicting Leto’s U.S. expat who sets up shop in the Japanese criminal underground and promptly beats them all on their own turf, and maybe you wondered if the full-back koi tattoo wasn’t a little on-the-nose. Maybe you heard the word “SUMO!?” as a distant scream, as thousands impotently begged to understand how such a tone-deaf display of old-school Orientalism could have come to be. When will Jared Leto be stopped, and who among us can do it?

138. You Get MeAn erotic thriller neither thrilling nor erotic, filled out with a cast of post-Disney starlets and Vine stars temporarily separated from their handlers, this poor-man’s Fatal Attraction plays like a rich symphony of bad choices. We all know the drill: Guy steps out on girlfriend, guy breaks things off with side piece, side piece turns psycho and wreaks vengeful havoc on guy. That time-tested formula gets sullied here by awe-inspiringly dumb dialogue (“I love Tumblr,” one character says, in a subtle reminder that we all someday shall die), and an inability to impose the sexual maturity the story calls for onto the teen characters enacting it. Most troubling of all, this film inadvertently makes the argument that the erotic-thriller tradition necessarily can’t survive in the millennial generation. Up until Lohanian — Lohanesque? — star Bella Thorne gets all stabby, the tensest moments see our boy dramatically sending a text message and his sleuthing girlfriend dramatically checking Facebook. The kids have no idea what they’re doing. Get off my sexy, homicidal lawn!

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137. True Memoirs of an International AssassinQ: When is an Adam Sandler movie not an Adam Sandler movie? A: When it’s a showcase for his regular associate Paul “Kevin James” Blart, Mall Cop. Though the Sandman does not show his face in this feature — a dime-store espionage flick that casts Blart as a spy novelist who stumbles into one of his own stories — his authorial fingerprints of passive chauvinism and total stylistic indifference have been smeared all over the frame. More to the point, this film presents a grossly inaccurate depiction of the writer’s creative process. For starters, who deletes a sentence by repeatedly pressing the ‘delete’ key for each individual letter? Highlight and delete, man, or at least hold the key down! Who’s got that kind of time?

136. The Kissing BoothTeens and their mushy, impressionable brains should be kept far away from this putrid rom-com that plays like the most regrettable studio acquisition of 1989. They’ll get all the wrong lessons from the inadvisable courtship between spunky Elle (Joey King) and bad boy Noah (Jacob Elordi), a relationship forbidden due to Elle’s lifelong friendship with Noah’s brother Lee (Joel Courtney). Director Vince Marcello plays off male possessiveness and other manifestations of entitlement — so much fuss gets made over how this poor girl chooses to dress — like the order of the day, hardly batting an eye at Noah’s nagging violent tendencies. The movie works tirelessly to uphold the hollow honor of “dude code,” that unspoken etiquette dictating how men may lay claim to and trade access to the women in their lives. Let it instead die the natural death awaiting it.

135.The Ridiculous 6Sandler stretched himself a little bit by getting into genre work with this Western. Springing this viciously unfunny John Ford riff on America two weeks before Christmas 2015 like a present nobody especially wanted, Sandler portrays a leathery cowpuncher on a search for his wayward Pa with his legion of half-brothers. Their ramble through the countryside mostly exists to cue up collar-tug-worthy cracks at Native Americans and an inexplicable number of “jokes” revolving around donkey feces.

134. I Am Not An Easy ManYou’ve got to hand it to France — they may be as good at churning out unfathomably ill-conceived studio comedies as Hollywood. Hell, given the country’s more casual relationship to the strictures of political correctness, they’re probably even better. Case in point is I Am Not An Easy Man, a “comedy” that makesI Feel Pretty look like a Betty Friedan book. One afternoon, a chauvinist pig walks into a pole on the street and awakens in a world where the roles of men and women have been completely reversed! The satire just writes itself! Though, in a much more real way, it does not. The script goes for every easy joke, no matter how distasteful; the sight of men running around in Juicy tracksuits with “HOT” on the butt is sub-camp-skit funny, but a scene that faces him with the same sexual harassment he’d previously practiced is nothing but chilling. On the bright side, Bright’s mastery of allegory appears subtle in comparison.

133. MuteYou can’t fault Duncan Jones for believing in himself. This sci-fi epic is an incoherent mess filtered through an intensely personal vision, and the result is something closer to Battlefield Earth than Southland Tales. Jones clearly poured a lot of himself into the outlay of a techno-Berlin in the year 2035, peopled as it is by such oddballs as Silent Amish Bartender Alexander Skarsgard and Flamboyantly Mustachioed Black-Market Surgeon Paul Rudd. The writing confounds the viewer by constantly bursting out into narrative seizures about robot sex or child pornography while remaining steadfastly boring through its two-plus hours. It’s the rare film that’s impossible to describe without making its badness sound more entertaining than it actually is.

132. The Fundamentals of CaringThat this film could actually manage to be worse than its title is a grim sort of accomplishment. Its pathos is so disingenuous and suffocating that not even Human Embodiment of Charm Paul Rudd can salvage it. He plays a depressed writer (red flag No. 1) who’s going through a divorce (red flag No. 2) following the untimely death of his son (red flag No. 3), and coping by taking new work as a live-in caregiver (red flag No. 4) for a smart-aleck teen (red flag No. 5). Together, they set out on a cross-country road trip (red flag No. 6) and pick up a potential love interest for the boy in a streetwise drifter girl (red flag No. 7), who is also Selena Gomez (red flag No. 8). By starting with a premise so rich with potential for overcooked emotional manipulation, the film sets an uphill battle for itself so steep that it can fall right off the mountain.

131. When We First MetWhen you’re into someone who’s not into you, it’s hard not to imagine what you could have done differently; if only you had worn this shirt instead of that one, said something smooth instead of something awkward, made a move at just the right moment … The vast majority of us come to accept that sometimes it’s just not meant to be, and move on. In this rom-com of toxic infatuation, however, Adam DeVine’s lovelorn lame-o spends years secretly lusting after his best friend (Alexandra Daddario) only to happen into a time-travel booth that sends him back to their first night together. The film behaves as if his efforts to use his extensive knowledge of her personality to trick her younger self into falling for him are sweet but misguided. In actuality, he’s a moving embodiment of that immortal Onion article “Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested.”

130. Father of the YearOur world is full of unknowable mysteries: How does the aurora borealis form? What happened to D.B. Cooper? And for the love of all that is holy, what is going on with David Spade’s accent in this half-baked Happy Madison production? His character Wayne seems to hail from the same stretch of the Rust Belt as Spade’s dirtbag extraordinaire Joe Dirt, but his voice places him somewhere in the Little Australia neighborhood of Boston. That’s the sturdiest point of interest in this comedy of beta-male manners that pits Wayne against rival dad Mardy (Nat Faxon, who has an Oscar), much to the chagrin of their college-aged sons (Joey Bragg and Matt Shively). Their idiotic feud to determine the top paterfamilias leads to accidental MDMA-dropping and male breast enhancement, but the mischief does little to perk up an otherwise stultifying family outing. This film is the equal and opposite reaction to the era of the Hot Dad.

129. A Christmas PrinceI’ve got a theory that if you showed this Yuletide rom-com to someone who had never seen a movie before — ideally, someone who had never even heard of movies — it would positively charm them. Few movies cycle through the clichés of their genre with such a rigorous lack of imagination, and if someone hadn’t already grown tired of the klutzy but cute workin’ girl who falls for a debonair, rich Adonis, they’d feel for our gal Amber (Rose McIver). They wouldn’t bat an eye at the ludicrous plot sending this newly minted reporter on her first-ever assignment to report on the royal family of a fictitious European nation, and they wouldn’t think twice about the improbable mix-up that brings Amber closer to the dashing prince under the pretext of mistaken identity. They wouldn’t roll their eyes at Amber’s conniving brunette-haired foil, or the last-minute deus ex machina that brings the leads — who met earlier that week — together in marriage. This theoretical person would take it all at face value and love it. Sadly, we cannot be so naïve.

128. The BabysitterThis ’80s-throwback slasher from notorious Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle director McG is an inexplicable Satanic-panic flick that pits a nail-biting kid against his hottie coed caretaker and the rest of her death cult. Why, when he first catches an eyeful of the group (which also includes Bella Thorne, suddenly everywhere) turning a game of spin the bottle into a bloodbath, do the words “WHAT THE FUCK” suddenly fly onto the screen in giant red text? And then later on, when he uses a handy knife given to him by his good pal Anton Chekov in the first act, why does McG throw the phrase “POCKET KNIFE … BITCHES!” in our faces? Why does the film break up its PG-13 comedy with geysers of gore that John Woo might call “a little much?” Why, after getting shot in the chest, is Bella Thorne unconcerned about her own health and wholly preoccupied with her cans no longer being perfect? Why is there so much trouble in the world?

127. BlockbusterWhere did the French get their reputation as masters of romance? July Hygreck’s tone-deaf rom-com could singlehandedly rewrite the national caricature, so repellent is its approach to courtship. Lola (Charlotte Gabris) kicks Jeremy (Syrus Shahidi) to the curb with good reason, and still the film tacitly cheers him on as he goes about whipping up a DIY superhero movie to win her back. Because Lola loves the capes-and-tights set, this gesture is presented as a thoughtful, quirky demonstration of devotion in the vein of Be Kind Rewind (that Lola’s favorite director is explicitly stated to be Michel Gondry, who cameos in the film, should not come as a surprise), instead of an unsavory homage to the guy who wouldn’t stop playing piano. The most baffling aspect of all is that a female director would be behind this blend of toxic male entitlement and high-viscosity corn syrup.

126. BrightWhile definitely the most high-profile bad Netflix movie — a budget big enough to lure Suicide Squad director David Ayer and star Will Smith, plentiful CGI, a log line as simple as “orc cop” — this feature-length insult to the concept of allegory is not quite the worst in the library. But credit Ayer for giving it the ol’ college try, rehashing the racial commentary of his breakout script Training Day for an alternate Los Angeles where hulking magical beasties stand in for black folks. From this unsound premise he weaves an incomprehensible story involving a powerful magic wand, Noomi Rapace as a tremulous elf, and latent plot-hole-fixing superpowers revealed at just the right moment. The merciful among you may feel moved to award Ayer some pity points for following an original thought instead of churning through more franchise fare, but the script relinquishes any goodwill with four simple words: “Fairy lives don’t matter.”

125. iBoyThe primary utility of this rinky-dink attempt at a superhero movie (I’ll say this but once: Do not produce an effects-driven action film if you do not have the budget to make those effects look good) is to determine Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams’s viability as a big-screen quantity. That’s really the only intriguing question in this unattractive, rote squandering of a neat concept, namely, a crime-fighter with the power to interface with all electrical devices. While some of us might use technopathy to redistribute wealth or expose covert wrongdoing, our hero Tom (Bill Milner) instead goes after neighborhood toughs like a USB-enabled Kick-Ass. Williams, as Tom’s inevitable love interest, is fine.

124. TauRiding high off his Oscar win for a Winston Churchill buried under pounds of prosthetic jowl, Gary Oldman estranged himself even further from humanity by voicing the artificially intelligent computer program that gives this dismal sci-fi project its title. Looming over a captive test subject (Maika Monroe), Tau’s twisted creator (Ed Skrein) explains that this A.I. is so advanced that it must be “cut off from the outside world,” which amounts to Tau acting like a complete dumbass all of the time. Left alone with Monroe’s wily prisoner, he peppers her with infantile questions mostly about what different words mean, eventually segueing into a pas de deux most accurately described as “Ex Machina on stupid pills.” What does it mean to live, Tau wonders; this critic found himself wondering the same thing, albeit in a more existentially despairing tenor.

123.Sandy WexlerThis biopic of a fictitious, incompetent, ill-mannered talent manager benefited from the subtle handicap of lowered expectations, exceeding the likes of The Do-Over with a handful of decent one-liners and some amusing celebrity cameos. One gets the impression that Sandler’s actually trying in this train wreck, as opposed to the more passive train wrecks that preceded it. But praising the “best Adam Sandler movie for Netflix” is like choosing your favorite dental procedure. Either way, by the time it’s over, you won’t be able to feel part of your face.

122.#realityhighOne day, Congress will pass a bill rendering hashtag movie titles punishable by law, but until then, we’re stuck with this utterly clueless Clueless wannabe. (Or Easy A. Hell, even The DUFF. This is the saddest kind of bad movie, one that feels like a worse version of so many wonderful movies.) The latest in a long line of films that know teenagers use social media but utterly fail to understand how, this pat after-school special dispenses nuggets of wisdom about being true to yourself and knowing who your friends are that possess all the depth and nuance of a tweet. I pray that today’s teens, for their own sake, will get better nostalgia objects than this one.

121. The Cloverfield ParadoxThe greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the viewership of Super Bowl LII to watch this movie. Turns out all the hubbub over the zero-warning release was all compensation — for a plot cobbled together from no fewer than four classics, for cut-rate production values suggesting the producers set most of their $45 million budget on fire, and perhaps the most cynical, mercenary approach to connected-universe franchising yet. Gugu Mbatha-Raw does her best as an astronaut mourning the death of her children (would you believe that comes up later on in the film?) as she and her colleagues inadvertently shoot themselves into an unpredictable parallel dimension. A handful of nifty set pieces get kneecapped by technical shortcomings, and the big reveal as to what the hell this all has to do with Cloverfield is so cheap, so manipulative, and so nihilistic that it could have come from one of the latter seasons of The Walking Dead.

120. Death NoteAfter slogging through this American anime adaptation, the best thing a viewer can say about director Adam Wingard is that he’s a master of misdirection. We were all so focused on the question of whitewashing in this originally Asian property that the media narrative almost entirely ignored how defiantly uninteresting this movie is. How could a story that reimagines Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov as a hot genius teen on a lethal mission to cleanse the world of evil and features real-life god of death Willem Dafoe as an apple-munching CGI god of death, possibly turn out so dull? It’s not just the visual flatness that trades the bustle of metropolitan Japan for permanently grey Seattle, but that this morality tale’s moralizing is fundamentally inconsistent. It contradicts itself too many times to make any lucid point.

119. The Week OfAnything setting up Rachel Dratch to do a long-form Lawng Eyeland accent cannot be all bad. But she’s merely a supporting player on Netflix’s latest two-hour episode of the Adam Sandler show, a hellacious and unending variety program in which the softest-working man in show business alternates between his tiny-man squeaking and his angry-man yelling. (Not all funny voices are created equal.) Dratch and Sandler are the proud parents of the bride in this nuptial culture clash as they struggle to fit in with the black groom’s family, in particular his suave surgeon dad Chris Rock. There’s a bit of Lady Bird-ish insight on the awkwardness of being in the lower half of the middle class, but it’s hard to hear over the sound of Sandler’s strangulated yowling.

118. Happy AnniversaryHow can the end product of a team-up between two performers as generously lovable as Noël Wells and Ben Schwartz and a bulldog puppy end up so grating and charmless? Blame writer-director Jared Stern, the guy responsible for The Internand the short-lived sitcom Dr. Ken, who packs this portrait of a disintegrating romance with unbearable one-liners like, “It’s not called gently reclining in love, it’s called falling in love!” The film traces their slow breakup from fight to fight, forgetting to first give the audience a compelling reason to root for these two self-absorbed platitude factories to stay together. Without that, their separation feels only right and overdue, eons removed from the mournful register Stern’s going for. The film gets to the conclusion that some relationships aren’t worth struggling for about 80 minutes after everyone else.

117. ExtinctionUniversal had a good reason to ditch this sci-fi genocide allegory with scant days to go before its theatrical release. Somebody high up must have yanked the rip cord after witnessing the dopey plot twist too predictable to conceal here: maintenance worker Michael Peña’s recurring nightmares about alien annihilation have sprung to life, imperiling his dutiful wife Lizzy Caplan and their formidably annoying kids. Or so you thought — the invading “aliens” are actually humans, and the Peña-Caplan family are all artificially intelligent androids! A rogue human comes to learn that the bots can feel, just like flesh-and-blood homo sapiens, cuing up the sagacity that killing people is wrong. A leaden work of Commentary 101 dressed as an action tentpole — more like Bore of the Worlds, am I right? — it is also proof that an effects-driven film can look heavily produced without looking polished.

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﻿116. Special CorrespondentsWhile drumming up publicity during postproduction, director-writer-star Ricky Gervais said of this motion picture, “Even though it would certainly be billed as a comedy, it’s not a big, broad, loud, obvious, one … It’s a bit satirical.” One gets the sense Gervais knew, deep down, how dismal his reviews would be, and moreover, the specific nature of that dismalness. For this big, broad, loud, obvious comedy does indeed aspire to satire with its harebrained plot about two thick-skulled news-radio journalists ginning up a bogus Ecuadorian revolution from the safety of a guest room in America. But Gervais cannot muster either the brains or balls to say anything substantive about the anything-goes state of modern media or hectic banana republics in South America. The heroically distasteful Gervais of The Office feels so far away.

115.The Most Hated Woman in AmericaThis biopic of atheism activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair is a platform for Melissa Leo that would’ve been an abandoned Oscar horse ten years ago, and barely exists now. Leo gets to chew a whole lot of scenery as she takes the fight to remove prayer from public schools into court, attracts scorn from every corner of society, and eventually gets herself abducted. Melissa Leo diehards will relish the chance to see her don all manner of creative hairpieces and coke-bottle glasses that I’m pretty sure get a little bit bigger with every passing scene. Regular people will wonder how a film ostensibly dealing with First Amendment rights could possibly generate zero original insight.

114. Christmas InheritanceSweet Home Alabama heads north of the Mason-Dixon in this seasonal rom-com that could be most charitably praised as “not A Christmas Prince.” Well-meaning but hopelessly pampered Ellen (Eliza Taylor) grows a conscience while traveling to her provincial hometown of Snow Falls, the quaintest frost-laced village Thomas Kinkade never imagined. If she wants her massive inheritance, she’ll first have to deliver a letter to her father’s former business partner using no more than the $100 in her pocket, a quest that wins her the heart of human mayonnaise jar Jake Lacy and teaches her a valuable lesson about checking her privilege. Will someone start a GoFundMe for Andie MacDowell so she doesn’t have to take paycheck gigs like this ever again?

113. David Brent: Life on the RoadHaving successfully alienated his fanbase with a steady stream of smug press appearances and awards-show hosting gigs, perhaps Ricky Gervais figured he’d do well to shut up and play the hits. He took the biggest crowd-pleaser in his repertoire (fatuous boob David Brent of the British Office) out of mothballs for this uninspired spin-off that finds the former middle manager, reduced now to grunt work at a toilet chemical company, touring with his band Foregone Conclusion. Leaving behind the setting of Wernham Hogg and the co-workers that went with it reveals the conceptual limits of the Brent’s constant self-humiliation. The touring band that refuses to be in a room with him even as they empty his life savings, the brutal un-self-awareness — without the hard-earned underlying note of sympathy, it’s all just sadistic.

112. Sara’s NotebookIn case you thought Americans had sole title to the “account of third-world strife through the safe viewpoint of a well-meaning white person” movie, Spain is here to set you straight. Visiting the same morass of violence and political destabilization that plagued Beasts of No Nation’s corner of Africa, this film sends Laura (Bélen Rueda) into the middle of the Congo’s mineral wars to search for her wayward sister, no matter the costs. What’s clearly intended as a tribute to one woman’s bravery amidst inhumanity completely misses the point by leaving the Africans this war actually affects on the sideline. It’s not as catastrophically clueless as Sean Penn’s The Last Face, but this transgression is accentuated by the presence of Beasts of No Nation in Netflix’s streaming library, a film that does correctly everything this film does wrong.

111. Duck Duck GooseChildren, if your parents have exposed you to this very-bad-no-good cartoon, tell your teacher, religious official, or another responsible adult in your area. They should know better than to subject an innocent child to the volley of poop jokes, age-inappropriate pop-culture references, and pathos-as-afterthought contained in this sub-Minions animated abomination. Jim Gaffigan voices a carefree goose bachelor who ends up in custody of two defenseless baby ducks separated from their flock. (DUCK. DUCK. GOOSE. DO YOU GET IT?!) He has no choice but to take them under his wing and return them from whence they came, learning some threadbare lessons about responsibility along the way. And because this film was produced by the Wanda Media Company as well as Jiangsu Yuandongli Computer Animation Company, and because we are at the mercy of the Chinese entertainment economy, the film is set in China. It’s all very weird and pretty terrible.

110. XOXOImagine Nashville (the Robert Altman movie, not the TV show where Hayden Panettiere is secretly Taylor Swift), but with EDM instead of country-western music. Now remove that film’s soul-sickness over the fluctuating American character and replace it with a pat star-is-born narrative that was already done to death when We Are Your Friends dropped the beat one year earlier. Throw in a handful of barely identifiable TV players, such as That Cute Girl From Modern Family, Wasn’t He On The Good Wife?, and Chris D’Elia. Then take a tab of MDMA, wait about 40 minutes (30 if it’s pure), and tape a tablet playing the Coachella livestream on a loop to your head. For all intents and purposes, you have now seen the film XOXO.

109. ParadoxI got yer paradox right here: How could a sci-fi/Western featuring Neil Young as a futuristic bandit roving the countryside in search of computer keyboards and Super 8 cameras feel like such a chore, even at 73 minutes? Trace the project’s roots back to director Daryl Hannah’s relationship with Young and this self-indulgent vanity project starts to make a little more sense. More amateurish than Amateur, this dilettante’s dabble plods from one farmland pseudo-koan to another while Hannah and her costume-closet players wander aimlessly through the prairies. Young is, at best, conscious. I’m tempted to liken Hannah’s calamitous approach to The Room, another labor of love from someone with too much money and too little oversight, but at least Tommy Wiseau talks funny. Call me when this gets the Disaster Artist treatment by the mid-2030’s.

108. How It EndsDirector David M. Rosenthal takes The Roadless traveled by, and unfortunately, it makes all the difference. Will (Theo James) and Tom (Forest Whitaker) blaze a path from Chicago to Seattle after a whopper of an earthquake threatens their mutually beloved Sam (Kat Graham), Will’s fiancée and Tom’s daughter. A lopsided script deals them the usual barriers — roving gangs of ravagers, further weather cataclysms, injury — and when they do finally make it out West, what awaits them there pales in comparison to what they’ve been through. The poor judgement extends to casting as well, with Whitaker acting circles around James. In a film economy besotted with end-times narratives, many of which can be streamed right from Netflix, there’s little cause to bother with a below-average entry such as this.

107. NakedThose in search of English filmmaker Mike Leigh’s stupendous 1993 portrait of one unmoored drifter’s search for meaning in life are in for a big surprise. They are also in for a whole lot of Marlon Wayans’s bare ass. That’s pretty much the whole joke in this Groundhog Day disciple: trapping the funnyman in an hour-long temporal loop that always begins with him waking up, birthday-suited, in an elevator. The tired “immature guy learns to sack up and accept the responsibility of adult love” arc might be forgiven if the movie ensconcing it had the decency to be funnier.

106. To Each, Her Own Another culture-clash comedy to keep the International Collection cluttered, this one by way of France: Simone (Sarah Stern) doesn’t have the brass ovaries to inform her devoutly Jewish family that she’s married to Claire (Julia Piaton), and then starts to question her own identity as a lesbian when she gets the hots for a hunky Senegalese chef (Jean-Christophe Folly). If this came out in America, some PR flack would have known enough to work the “proudly un-PC!” angle, but because it comes from our less optics-conscious Gallic neighbors, it’s just plain old racist. The script busts out every antiquated stereotype in the book, with plenty of unimaginative caricature to go around for the Jews, the Muslims, the LBTQ community, and whoever else might be curious enough to watch this best-forgotten cringefest.

105. Orbiter 9Only God and Ted Sarandos will ever know why, but Netflix seems to be willing to buy up just about any sci-fi project it can get its licensing contracts on. This Spanish-language beneficiary of that policy has a Passengers thing going on, with another sexy spaceship-dweller manipulated into intercourse under false pretexts with a man she doesn’t realize is her captor. Director Hatem Khraiche sees the putrid foundation of this premise more clearly than Morten Tyldum ever did, but the lack of star-power as a serviceable distraction leaves the match-up a wash. Let the record show that Passengers and Visually Lush Spanish Passengers are equally skippable!

104. SometimesA notion that could be the stuff of great black-box theater turns into a limply mounted The More You Know advert in this single-issue drama imported from India. Seven strangers sit in a doctor’s waiting room, all of them uncomfortable because the results of their HIV tests are on the way and they know there’s one positive in the mix. Their forced, unnatural dialogue gracelessly outs them as hailing from different walks of life, going just short of superimposing the words “it could happen to you, too!” over the frame. Though that could have very well happened, as the film’s not afraid to be as literal as possible; after the final scene, the production team shows up onscreen to fully spell out how serious the spread of AIDS has become in the subcontinent, but by that point, we all know.

103. Sand CastleAfter a few cinematic treatments, a sense of character begins to crystallize for America’s major wars: WWII was a noble mission, the brutality of which nobody could anticipate; Vietnam was an anything-goes quagmire of senseless chaos; and the post-9/11 war on terror has been defined by its lack of definition. This account of one American squadron’s FUBAR efforts to repair a water pump in 2003 Iraq parrots back the analysis already put forth by other fictive postmortems: that sketchily defined parameters made this an unwinnable war, an occupation with no clearly demarcated start date, exit strategy, objective, enemy, or battles. Nicholas Hoult, to his credit, plays his reluctant soldier as a bit savvier than the usual bumpkin on a collision course with shell shock. But otherwise, Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Coimbra contributes nothing novel to the conversation.

102. What Happened to MondayThere’s no denying that Noomi Rapace certainly does a lotof acting in this sci-fi dud, playing identical septuplets forced to live underground in a future society under a one-child policy. Each septuplet gets to stray out in the world under a shared identity for one day of the week, though they all have one distinctive character trait, Multiplicity-style. A ludicrous conspiracy plot linking government officials and nefarious schemes to control the populace through resource withholding gives the film shape, explained through endless and interminable dumps of exposition and implausible turns of plot. (Of course Glenn Close did it. Glenn Close always did it!) Director Tommy Wirkola’s fatal error was evidently blowing his entire budget on hairpieces; this film’s wig budget makes RuPaul’s Drag Race’s wig budget look like Key and Peele’s wig budget.

101. Ali’s Wedding Actor Osamah Sami reworked his own memoir Good Muslim Boy and stars as an outsized version of himself in this unabashedly mawkish comedy of manners set among Australia’s Muslim population. As Ali, Sami faces the same generational frictions as Kumail Nanjiani did in The Big Sick: parents turning up the heat on an arranged marriage when he’s got his eye on someone of his own choosing, additional pressure to achieve in a field of little interest to him. Ali lies to his family about his med school test scores and sets a series of farces in motion, all as he pursues his crush Dianne (Helenna Sawires) in a lunge at personal agency. Though Jeffrey Walker’s film won awards Down Under, an unbothered comfort with the hoariest of clichés — he does the running-to-the-plane bit, and not even in an ironic way — makes a drag of this one.

100. Irreplaceable YouRemember that “Modern Love” column where the woman dying of cancer makes her husband a dating profile so she can find him a suitable replacement? It’s okay if you didn’t, because this isn’t based on that, though it might as well be. (Don’t worry, Universal’s got an authorized adaptation coming down the pipe.) Gugu Mbatha-Raw rejects her own limitations by fixing up love of her waning life Michiel Huisman, though of course she’ll have to face her cold fate eventually. On the way to a banal final moral, director Stephanie Laing indulges in all manner of shameless emotional manipulations, the most egregious of which revolves around a rascally terminal patient portrayed by Christopher Walken. He puts a brave face on while withstanding suffering, both within and without the context of the film.

99. The ClimbIn 2005, a French-Algerian free spirit who had never set foot on a mountain in his life summited Everest through sheer force of will. Pride for his banlieue motivated him to keep going when the going got tough, holding up a sign marked “93” to shout them out when he reached the peak. In this fictionalized treatment of events, stand-in Samy (Ahmed Sylla) does it all for a girl, his sign now marked “Nadia” at the unearned triumphant ending visible from several snowcapped miles away. Samy believes conquering the tallest mountain on the planet will prove to Nadia that he’s reliable and win her love; as far as I can tell, it proves that he’s impulsive and prone to highly impractical gestures of grandeur. Forcing this story into the mold of a romance negates the inspirational overtones and makes Nadia into a trophy awarded to Samy right on cue.

98.ClinicalEverybody knows therapists are just as unwell as their patients, but Dr. Jane Mathis (Vinessa Shaw) has a little bit more going on upstairs than the usual head-case shrink. She’s still haunted by the memory of a patient she couldn’t save, and in a more literal capacity, by the girl’s ghost. A new patient (Mad Men’s Kevin Rahm, unrecognizable beneath his disfigured-face prosthetics) dredges up these painful remembrances for Jane, and might just create some new ones while he’s at it. The horror elements are about as fearsome as lukewarm tapioca pudding, but the movie earns a couple points for experimenting with an unorthodox parallel structure of storytelling, as Jane’s plot unfolds in tandem with her patient’s recounting of his own tribulations.

97. AnonI was rooting for you,Gattaca director Andrew Niccol, we were all rooting for you! He had proven himself a skilled conceptual alchemist ever since writing The Truman Show, magicking shaky ideas into forward-looking brilliance with nothing but good ol’ scriptwriting. The big innovation of this sci-fi misstep is the Mind’s Eye, a nonstop heads-up display located in the brain that makes everyday life look like a video game. Niccol has been wise about future panic up until now, when he alternately ignores and simplifies the implications of a complete eradication of privacy. He assigns a pat killer-on-the-loose plot to an intriguing hook, casting Clive Owen as the hard-nosed detective hunting a murderer off the universal grid, and Amanda Seyfried goes digital femme fatale as a woman mysteriously exempt from the omnipresent readout. Their individual arcs cannot hope to compete with the fascination of the world containing them, a world we’re never permitted to fully explore. Substitute teachers looking to keep eighth graders busy for an hour would be better off with another Gattaca rewatch.

96. MercyAdult children tend to show their true colors when their parents reach their deathbed. But divvying up possessions with Post-it notes is nothing compared to the lengths four half-brothers are willing to sink to just to get at their deteriorating mama’s money. The “big broken family” subset of drama gets an injection of horror when a gang of masked intruders storm the house, their employer and motivations unclear. They’re obviously in cahoots with one of the brothers, and director-writer Chris Sparling posits which one made the call as the suspense-generating question, but he’s made one fatal miscalculation: For that approach to work, the audience must first be given a reason, any reason at all, to care about what happens to these people. With each brother blander than the next, however, the big reveal wields all the dramatic heft of a balloon.

95. In the Shadow of IrisFrench erotic thrillers are like the beef stew of cinematic genres: Throw all the ingredients together in the pot, let everything get soft and savory, and it’s nearly impossible to foul up. I wish I could explain to you how a film with such magnanimous proportions of asphyxiations and underbutt could still be so lethargic, but I’m stumped myself. My suspects: the film’s sanitized cinematography, which fights the lurid subject matter and comes, fittingly, from a man named Bastard; the dueling male leads, who are both personality vacuums; and the prime suspect, an unsporting attitude toward sexuality of the deviant variety. Erotic-thriller sex should be scary in a hot way, not scary in a 50 Shades of Grey way.

94. Shimmer LakeSmarter than the average Coen Brothers ripoff (looking at you, Cut Bank), this one has the good sense to also be a Memento ripoff. Moving in reverse for no apparent reason, writer-director Oren Uziel squanders a handful of wonderful character actors (Michael Stuhlbarg has his fun even though his character belongs in a different, more interesting movie; Oliver Platt does a bang-up job with his haughty inspector) and some attractive photography on an ill-fated crime saga that resolves itself before it’s even begun. As Uziel’s clear inspiration Marge Gunderson might say, “And for what? A little bit of money.”

93.SpectralWhat we have here is an expensive concept for a film (a small platoon of soldiers gets picked off by invisible foes, a conflict dutifully outed by critics as a variation on “Aliens goes Xbox”) that has been granted perhaps half of the budget it needed to succeed. Throwing more money at a production rarely solves problems, but for a premise that wholly orients itself around the near-pornographic gazing upon military weaponry — much of it fantastical, engineered with futuristic technologies explained at length — looking good is everything. Without the required aesthetic polish, all that’s left is a scrawny weakling flexing technical muscles it doesn’t have.

92. Brain on FireSusannah Cahalan had it all: a great job writing for the New York Post, a devoted boyfriend, bright prospects. Just as it seemed like life couldn’t get much better, she started acting strangely, blacking out for long spans of time and behaving in an increasingly erratic manner. Cahalan’s real-life account of frightened confusion at her own brain’s rebellion didn’t require much jazzing up for this dramatization, in which Chloe Grace-Moretz portrays the walking medical mystery. As disturbing as the premise could be, director Gerard Barrett can’t translate the internal psychological havoc to the visual medium quite so effectively. And while she certainly gives it her all, Grace-Moretz can’t hope to outshine the poor script and listless lensing. A jumbled union of the medical thriller and psycho-terror, it’s a waste of a perfectly good movie title.

91. Candy JarHe’s a young paragon of black excellence with a pristine sense for matching sweaters to ties. She’s a Type-A flibbertigibbet with an internal monologue that just won’t quit. They don’t see eye-to-eye on anything in this high-school comedy, but can these two master debaters put their differences aside long enough to win the state championship, find friendship, or maybe something more? Let me put it this way: Is there a peppy “gettin’ stuff done!” montage? On both counts, the answer is a confidently intoned yes. It’s as dull as it sounds, and only made worse by the despair of seeing Uzo Aduba and Christina Hendricks roped into this as the leads’ respective moms. And that title? Not a symbol for anything, not even pertinent to the story, simply an object present in a faculty member’s office. The title is an enigma more engrossing than the film containing it.

90. Coin HeistCoins are amazing — designed using lasers, mass-produced through an elaborate assembly line of casting and forging, inspected down to the tiniest detail for flaws so minute only professionals can see them, and all for something we keep in our pockets only to trade for chewing gum. That said, it is a bad sign indeed when a viewer finds himself more interested in the quiet dignity of coin-making than in the plot of the film he’s currently watching. This caper about a gang of high-schoolers who overcome their clique divisions to save their school by stealing $10 million is so tiresomely familiar — both as a heist movie and a teen movie — that watching it even for the first time already feels like a remote memory.

89.To the BoneThe words “anorexia comedy” rightly set off alarm bells, but a winning performance from Lily Collins nearly salvages this tonal tightrope walk. She’s biting and inviting as a young artist in recovery for an intense eating disorder. Unfortunately, two worthwhile performances have gotten trapped in this otherwise maudlin film: there’s Collins, and an unexpected turn from Keanu Reeves as a tough-love physician with a heart of gold. Ninety minutes of those two shooting sarcastic remarks back and forth would’ve been dandy, but Alex Sharp and his intolerable romantic subplot have other plans.

88. Bomb ScaredYou thought eating disorders were a testy source for laughs? Here’s the terrorism spoof you asked for! This Spanish-language comedy focuses on a dunderheaded gang of Basque-separatist extremists, impatiently awaiting their next mission while Spain makes a run at the World Cup in the background. Director Borja Cobeaga treats their mission to await instruction in a safe house like a tedious office job and the characters like bumbling wage slaves instead of radicalized killers. If that sounds like a trivial approach to a serious topic, the film’s more mature understanding of how cells amass new members and perpetuate themselves saves quite a bit of face.

87. The Lighthouse of the OrcasSpain’s Gerardo Olivares goes into manual override on the audience’s water works in this tragic bedtime story, forcibly cranking the dials to 11 with facile pathos-bait. A mother (Maribel Verdú) whisks her autistic son (Joaquín Rapalini) away to Patagonia when the unresponsive boy suddenly perks up upon seeing majestic orca whales on the television. Putting down new roots in a rustic village as picturesque as a South American Nancy Meyers set, they fall in with a hunky whale trainer (Joaquín Furriel) and form a surrogate family unit too pure to last in a compromised world. Set aside the fact that Olivares clearly believes the autistic possess the ability to commune with animals on a telepathic level, as well as the throw-up-your-hands-in-futile-frustration ending — what right does he have to play the “sad little kid” card, having done none of the character work to earn it? The boy’s an abstraction, and a crudely drawn one at that.

86. White FangFor students weaseling their way out of reading Jack London’s classic wolfdog bildungsroman for a class assignment, this animated adaptation could be a godsend. For those of us who aren’t prepping a book report: The animation is weird and yet not weird enough to be morbidly captivating, the sketchy Native American spirit-world business is very much of a piece with its turn-of-the-century era, and the live-action Ethan Hawke version from 1991 hasn’t gone anywhere. Even comfort-food vocal performances from Rashida Jones and Nick Offerman in a mini-Parks and Rec reunion do little to perk up this neutered take on London’s writing. His White Fang had teeth, speaking to a young-adult audience prepared to reckon with the hazards of the natural world, but this kiddie spin strips the woods of their formidable might. A scene depicting dogfighting feels out of place in a film so mushy.

85. KodachromeTrue facts: In 2010, the humble processing house of Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, ceased their development of Kodachrome film, the final facility in the country to do so. The preceding weeks saw an influx of photo enthusiasts streaming in from across the country to get their exposures while they still could, and this drama follows once such road trip between cancer-stricken snapshotter Ben (Ed Harris), his good-natured assistant/nurse Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen), and his adult son Matt (Jason Sudeikis). From the 35mm cinematography to the adoring close-ups of vinyl records, all the analog fetishism is endearing, albeit a touch ironic when expressed using Netflix’s money and platform. Even so, the homespun pathos fueling this road-trip movie isn’t premium-grade.

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84. Take the 10For those viewers in search of a scattershot, fitfully funny crime caper in which Tony Revolori spends one long day scrambling around the outskirts of L.A. trying not to get killed after a reckless friend pilfers a cache of expensive drugs from an unstable dealer, might I recommend the 2015 film Dope. At least that one had a more charming leading man in Shameik Moore than this one gets in Josh Peck, playing a sleazebag with the pretty face of a former child TV star. That movie had some entry-level commentary on race, too, and a nifty soundtrack from Pharrell. All this dime-store knockoff has is a Pulp Fiction-lite nonchronological structure, a closeted coke baron, and one great Danny Brown needle drop it unloads in the first 15 minutes. The most a critic can say is that its pop-culture references are very of-the-moment.

83. The Open HouseHere’s an unusual defect: Directors Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote don’t realize that they’ve simply extended the first act of what could be a solid horror movie to feature length and called it a day. A mother and her teenage son regroup in her sister’s vacant second home after the breadwinner’s car-crash death leaves them with a dried-up cash flow — what better location to be stalked and dispatched by a faceless killer? Angel and Coote have forgotten all the rules that hold slasher movies together: The baddie’s gotta be worth investing in (and preferably not, like, just some guy), so that his eventual defeat creates catharsis. If the killer is a non-entity and it all ends with him getting away with it while our surrogates die, what’s the point of this rigamarole? If we’re just here to watch people get their fingers snapped like pretzel sticks, the darker corners of YouTube won’t take nearly as much time.

82. HandsomeFrom the opening narration in which the culprit introduces himself and confesses to his crime, this comedy purports to be a different breed of murder mystery. And with a well-stocked cast — Jeff Garlin’s a lovable lout as the title detective, his sidekicks Natasha Lyonne and Chris Redd both consistently amuse, and Ricky Sargulesh himself, Steven Weber, portrays the prime suspect — it should be. The most pressing mystery of all, then, is why this film isn’t funnier. A game ensemble gets undermined by lackluster writing that halfheartedly teases noir clichés but never really does anything all that clever with them.

81. SaharaIn the abattoir of lowest-common-denominator kiddie entertainment, a viewer can sometimes read between the lines and see the grown-up writers starting to crack under their own madness. I credit this cut-rate French-Canadian co-production with offering the most glimpses into the frustration that comes alongside making a cartoon about the desert adventures of a scorpion and a cobra. One day, little Quebecois children will return to this staple of their youth and be shocked to find allusions to Tod Browning and Wild at Heart, off-color gags winking about anorexia and water sports, and one psychedelic montage in which snakes wiggle like spermatozoa into the sun’s mighty ovum. While this film is not “better” than Minions, its incompetence takes the shape of a quiet desperation rather than high-pitched screeching, which makes it slightly more compelling.

80. Little EvilIt’s a parody of The Omen where Adam Scott is convinced his new stepson is a vessel for the malicious spirit of Satan; to quote Barton Fink, “Whaddaya need, a road map?” The primary problem is that this has already been done sans Scott, in 2014’s thoroughly middling send-up Hell Baby. The other problem is that that film also happens to be funnier, going all-in on the demonic possession gags, where this film tries to mine its laughs from the lingering possibility that this could all be in Scott’s imagination. A strategic reserve of winning supporting performances (Bridget Everett playing a trans man is a questionable move, but damn if she isn’t hilarious) can’t enliven a diluted form of a solution that wasn’t all that strong to begin with.

79. Lucid DreamAmong the curiously large backlog of East Asian sci-fi projects that Netflix has imported, this does not rank among the more memorable. The hook has been done to death — to locate his missing son, a journalist (Go Soo) must use a device enabling him to enter the plane of dreams — and the film’s visual representation of this dream world is thoroughly unimaginative. (What if it’s like the regular world, but with a thin sheen of dehydrated urine over it?) Though nothing I can write about this ordinary, undistinguished investigative procedural will be as savagely cutting as the review from Korean critic Sun-ah Shim, which labels the film an “unsalvageable mediocrity.” Gotta keep that one in the pocket for future use.

78. SlamA lenient viewer can cut plenty of breaks for this coming-of-age film about teen skate punk Samuele (Ludovico Tersigni) manning up to handle his girlfriend’s unplanned pregnancy. If the dialogue is a bit flat or disjointed, chalk it up to the toil of first preserving Nick Hornby’s Brit witticisms in the Italian language, and then converting that all back into English. If the visual filters make some scenes look like they’re from single cheapest wide release of 1997, consider that director Andrea Molaioli may have been aping the cruddy skate videos that Tony Hawk disciple Samuele worships as holy. But the final shot, which contrasts three different definitions of the word “slam” to dimly comment on Samuele’s unremarkable life, is indefensible on a “today, we call them computers” level.

77. The Incredible Jessica JamesPerhaps the Sundanciest of all Sundance movies, James Strouse’s pedestal for former Daily Show truth-bomber Jessica Williams ticks all the requisite boxes on the “indie breakout” checklist: a comic talent from TV trying their hand with a little drama, the quarter-life-crisis getting-your-shit-together arc, the adoring photography of the Brooklyn setting, music that’s cool but not so cool that the score sounds like it’s trying too hard or anything. While Insecure and Issa Rae hold the game down on the opposite coast, Williams explores the travails of Tindering while young, black, and fabulous — but as she grows weary of the deadening repetition of dating, so too does her film follow a schematic that’s a little too familiar.

76.IbizaIt’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as Girls Trip, which came out last year: ground down by their day-to-day, running on nothing but the nourishment of friendship, a group of BFFs jet off to a glam locale for an interlude of romance, misadventures, and picturesque B-roll. While the besties all hold their own — Phoebe Robinson may be playing Phoebe Robinson, but Gillian Jacobs can handle a leading role and Vanessa Bayer’s mere presence eventually becomes hilarious — their environment fails to meet them halfway. Never mind that the dreamy Calvin Harris doppelgänger that Jacobs falls for is a waste of carbon, never mind all the easy jokes about Spaniards’ incorrigible lothario tendencies, never mind the abrupt non-ending. You’re telling me a movie about the EDM wonderland hidden on the Balearic islands had to shoot in Croatia?

75. The 101-Year-Old-Man Who Skipped Out on the Bill and DisappearedCantankerous centenarian Allan Karlsson (played by middle-aged comedian Robert Gustafsson) made his screen debut a few years ago in The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, which crushed the box office in Gustafsson’s native Sweden, and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Makeup to boot. The character’s somewhat perplexing popularity — his first film follows Karlsson through history as he rubs elbows with Great Men, like Forrest Gump with a dollop of gallows humor — has earned him this sequel, which sends Allan on a quest to ascertain the formula to a tasty Soviet-era soft drink called Folksoda. It’s business as usual, from the Social Studies 101 cameos (the Nixon impersonator they got isn’t even all that convincing) to enough dirty-grandpa gags to rival Dirty Grandpa, and it’s all a stitch less funny the second time around. How do you say “diminishing returns” in Swedish?

74. BenjiThe Great Louisiana Tax Break Production Boom has attracted many stars to the oak-lined streets of New Orleans over the past decade, and the latest addition to the list is the hottest star on four legs, wonder dog Benji. The best that can be said for this neutered reboot of the musty mutt franchise is that it makes active use of its surroundings where so many have attempted to obscure them. (The Lucky Dogs hot dog carts scattered across the Crescent City are a favorite of good ol’ Benji.) And yet nu-Benji lacks a certain canine charisma present in his doggy forebears, and weirder still, this film plays up the element of Christian dogma — thank you, thank you — traditionally constrained to the subtextual level. Woof.

73. RebirthThe first rule of this anti-corporate psychological thriller is do not talk about Fight Club. Otherwise viewers might start to notice how much DNA this peculiar cult film (and that’s in the literal sense, not the Rocky Horror sense) shares with David Fincher’s satire on the drudgeries of middle-class office-drone lifestyles. Joss Whedon utility player Fran Kranz steps in for the unstimulated desk-jockey role, and for his Tyler Durden, we’ve got a tattooed Adam Goldberg and his twitchy, coke-ranty energy. Goldberg breaks his pal out of a funk by inviting him to join a new movement of self-actualization he recently discovered, where instead of therapeutically punching the bologna out of one another, members chant creepy affirmations about accessing inner truth. There’s some bizarre, steamy fun to be had on the way to the revelation of what’s really going on here — if you’re gonna join a cult, at least you’re getting laid — but the destination can’t deliver the intrigue to justify the journey.

72. El Camino ChristmasAt a regular ol’ convenience store in a regular ol’ Nevadan town on a regular ol’ Christmas Eve, something highly irregular happens: A troubled young man (Luke Grimes) searching for his father pulls a gun and takes five hostages. Director David E. Talbert uses this pressure cooker as a breeding ground for a black comedy of schemers and bumblers, brought to life by a cast seemingly picked at random from a hat. (Tim Allen! Jessica Alba! Vincent D’Onofrio?!) A viewer gets the impression that nobody in this motley troupe was in contact with one another during shooting. The cartoonishly inept lawmen plotting to resolve the situation have a Keystone Kops thing going on, the news team broadcasting the events occupy a more cynical atmosphere, and on the scene indoors, the shooter and his bargaining chips are doing Coen brothers cosplay. As Yuletide counter-programming goes, it ain’t Tangerine.

71. Burning SandsYet another clone movie, this one retreading the stomach-churning account of hazing gone too far undertaken by Goat the previous year. In their condemnation of the Greek system’s culture of complicit silence around the physical and emotional abuse heaped upon new pledges, both films hit a lot of the same beats, fingering an uncaring school administration and the toxic mentality of compulsory masculinity. The racial aspect (the film takes place at fictitious HBCU Frederick Douglass University) sets this picture apart, complicating the portrayal of fraternities by rightly noting that they’ve been spaces of solidarity, support, and pride for the black community. Ethical rot has tainted this structure designed for empowerment, but it’s still too valuable to write off entirely.

70. Brahman NamanThe societal mores of India collide with a distinctly American strain of adolescent horniness in this English-language throwback to such seminal raunchfests as Porky’s. During the ’80s (when else?), a gaggle of gangly nerds drool over hot ladies and scheme about how to lose their respective V-cards. But instead of tiptoeing around the jocks, prevailing attitudes of mandated prudence mean that our boys must tiptoe around their parents, their nation, and their own guilt. Even a fresh, culturally specific angle can’t totally revitalize the long-in-the-tooth genre of the libidinous-teen-com though.

69. Come SundayThe instant you see that “produced by Ira Glass” credit, you know things are about to get buckwild. From the files of “This American Life” comes the true story of a Tulsa priest (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who up and declared one day that there is no Hell, God’s mercy is infinite, and every last son of a bitch on Earth is saved. The resulting uproar destroyed treasured relationships and put him through a great test of faith in line with Christian lore, and director Joshua Marston chooses to relate this with all the dramatic nuance of a Lifetime Original Movie. Marston steamrolls one man’s complete reorienting of his own beliefs, and with it, his view on everything from sexuality to mortality, into two dimensions. Not even a sensitive turn as an AIDS-positive organist from the unerring Lakeith Stanfield can earn this film salvation.

68.The KillerAnd now for something completely different: a Western by way of Brazil, where a scar-faced killer (those excited for a film about Spanish bullfighters are in for a rude awakening) plays the cowboy liberating a dusty village from a ruthless capitalist. Diogo Morgado cuts a commanding figure as our man Shaggy, a couple notches closer to feral than the usual gunslinger. His closest ancestor would probably be the Chilean Zen prophet in black, El Topo — both men have a haunted expression liable to turn cold at a moment’s notice, capable of terrible violence and deep introspection. The novelty only gets this film so far, however, when the production values could be best described as “lesser AMC drama.” Squarely shot and color-graded into next week under no discernible organized aesthetic code, it’s an unattractive film propped up by good bones.

67. The WarningSpanish filmmaker Daniel Calparsoro could have a long career ahead of him in Hollywood, where they crank out ambitious but imperfect conceptual thrillers like this one by the bushel. He’s cherrypicked his favorite plot devices from the past decade of respectable psycho-horror and stewed them together in a flawed package that nevertheless suggests potential down the road. An unstable man (Raúl Arévalo) develops an obsession with an inexplicably specific pattern of murders on the same day in the same spot, the intervals separating them being determined by a complex formula involving dates and witnesses present. As he slips deeper into mania, he realizes that only he can disrupt the pattern and save the next victim’s life, from which point the script somehow gets both stranger and blander. The Timecrimes swag-jacking begs for a “next Nacho Vigalondo” descriptor, but Calparsoro’s left plenty for himself to prove.

66. Forgive Us Our DebtsWhen Guido (Claudio Santamaria) has run out of money and pawned all his assets and gone completely bankrupt and still has no way to square up with his creditors, there’s only one option remaining. To work off his debt, Gudio joins the shadowy league of collectors and rapidly learns the ropes of a dishonest yet highly seductive profession where all rules have a bit of wiggle room. If it sounds like a Mafia movie, that’s almost certainly what Antonia Morabito was going for, as he reexamines the same conflict between self-interest and morality that comes with any life outside the law. The trouble is that Morabito either can’t or just doesn’t execute the cathartic this-is-cinema moments — hits, betrayals, shootouts with rival gangs — that Mob movies thrive on. While not a Fredo, this one’s still as flawed as a Sonny, and far from a Michael.

65.Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of DestinyThat this sequel to Ang Lee’s award-festooned wuxia masterwork is written in the English language instead of the original Chinese tells you all you need to know. It’s the most glaring of a handful of artistic compromises made by director Yuen Woo-ping, who proves unable to replicate the delicate grace that made the original a sleeper hit even in subtitle-unfriendly America. The painterly photography has been supplanted by the flatness of prestige TV, and the long, pensive gaps in which viewers were once free to appreciate the rustling of tree branches or distant chiming of bells are now filled with meaningless exposition. The brisk fight choreography elevates Yuen’s film to a level of basic competency, but there are approximately 500 better martial-arts films a person could be watching — and a few of them are on Netflix!

64. First MatchFor the white people who enjoyed feeling bad while gawking at poverty in Precious comes this drama that thrusts hardy teenager Monique (Elvire Emanuelle, who seems better than this even as an unknown quantity) into the white-knuckle world of Brooklyn’s underground fight circuit. Her recently paroled father ushers her into a career as a glorified pit bull, but the trouble is that Monique never comes off as a character with a life beyond this abusive relationship and the psychological dysfunction it’s caused. Trauma is often woven into the very fabric of a person’s identity, or at least it feels that way, but in Monique’s case, it’s the whole skein. Director Olivia Newman bolstered her script with up-close study of New York’s female fighters, but what she does with this information is a glaring contrivance.

63. Lust StoriesDown in India, the times they are a-changin’. A national cinema once limited by censorship and old-fashioned ideas about propriety is now exploring new sexual frontiers, this romantic anthology being a bracingly blunt case in point. (Behold, the first onscreen appearance of a vibrator in the history of Indian film!) Four separate stories revolve around women in various states of dissatisfaction — carnal, sure, but more frequently emotional. One cheater can’t bring herself to let go of her subpar husband, another summons the strength to give her marriage one more shot, a side piece patiently waits for the married man she’s seeing to come around, and a soft-spoken fiancée asserts herself in bed. A lot of the comedy errs on the side of the sophomoric, with one randy set piece taking cues from the risible The Ugly Truth, but what this effort represents still counts for quite a bit.

62. Imperial DreamsA curious specimen, this film was made and released in two dramatically different worlds. When the picture first premiered at Sundance in 2014, John Boyega was another handsome young Brit with a lot of promise and a stare capable of cutting metal. By the time Netflix unveiled it in 2017, he was an A-lister with a leading role in the biggest blockbuster franchise on the planet. Boyega stars here in the sort of small-scaled indie he’s now too expensive to appear in, as a recently freed gangster returning to L.A.’s volatile Watts neighborhood and learning how tough it can be to stay out of the game. Best-case scenario, this could have turned out to be a visual equivalent of Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, and Boyega’s definitely capable of playing that ambivalence toward the city that raised and subsequently tried to kill him. But hackneyed dialogue and predictable plotting get in the way of this film’s bid for true excellence.

61.The Siege of JadotvilleEver see a movie featuring a well-known actor with goofy facial hair and get the impression they’re trying more to hide from the audience than to blend in with the other characters? Fifty Shades of Grey todger-waggler Jamie Dornan dons a robust ’stache in this down-and-dirty war picture and fools exactly no one; we all know it’s you, Jamie Dornan. At any rate, this one’s pretty sharp about the geopolitical dimension of conflict, and overwrought when it comes to the personal. The retelling of one Irish U.N. peacekeeping force’s efforts to intervene in a Central African powder keg keenly understands how contradictory national interests must be resolved to foster a ceasefire, but cannot grasp the details of basic human behavior. That results in a weird dissonance, where the film works as a discrete whole but fails on a scene-by-scene basis.

60. TallulahFormer Orange Is the New Black writer Sian Heder tries her hand behind the camera for this study in contrasts about three women all chafing under the demands of motherhood in their own way. In the title role, Ellen Page is a street urchin feeling lost after her good-for-nothing boyfriend abandons her, but finds new meaning in life when fate puts a helpless infant in her custody. With her own mother out of the picture, “Lu” goes to her ex’s mother (Allison Janney) for help, though she’s got plenty of regrets left over from her time with her son. (As the wayward baby’s thoroughly unfit original guardian, Tammy Blanchard completes the triumvirate of bad moms.) Well-measured restraint improves the acting across the board, which in turn keeps this film away from the treacly sentiment that occasionally rears its weepy head. Janney takes it in a walk, naturally.

59. The RitualThere’s an argument to be made that all horror films are metaphors, their supernatural frights assisting an audience in their confrontation of death back in the real world, but some really lean into it. David Bruckner, a stalwart contributor to the recent rash of scary-shorts anthology projects, dresses up his feature debut with a lot of novel accouterments — four blokes on a hiking holiday through Sweden wander through uncharted woods and into an arcane Norse sacrifice to a freakish aberration — but can’t push his intelligence past the surface. He wrings every last drop of fear from the ominous trees and the chilling glimpse of the monster’s true face, all for a script that wields its subtext about coping with survivor’s guilt with all the subtlety of an antler to the gut. Tamp down the prosaic character development right from the script-writing textbook, give the nuckelavee (dare you to Google it) more screen time, and then maybe we’re getting somewhere.

58. The TitanSam Worthington is one of those actors whose blank expression and generically handsome features make him the perfect candidate to portray a robot. (See also: Emily Ratajkowski, Jamie Dornan.) Forestalling the inevitable, this sci-fi thought exercise gets near the mark by casting Worthington as something other than human — in this case, the next stage in evolution. He unwittingly plays guinea pig for scientists forcing the homo sapien to pre-adapt to the conditions of the Jupiter moon designated as humanity’s next home, and when he gets wise to what’s going on, it’s rampage time. There’s quite a bit going on in here, from flirtations with futuro-philosophy to a sly narrative shift positioning Taylor Schilling’s dutiful wife/researcher as the real protagonist of the story. The film lacks focus, however, glancing past a number of thoughtful paths in an effort to simultaneously take all of them.

57.A Message from the KingRoger Ebert once theorized that no film featuring a performance from Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh could be altogether bad. I’d add to that list Alfred Molina, who appears here in a typically stellar supporting turn as a rage-choked elder gangster. Casting’s really all that Fabrice Du Welz’s revenge thriller has going for it; Black Panther–to-be Chadwick Boseman busts out his South Afreekahn accent as a emigré who’s come to America from Cape Town in search of his lost sister. When he learns she’s recently been offed by some mobbed-up types, the rampage of vengeance begins, and as rampages go, it’s not half bad. Boseman’s an endlessly watchable performer, and Luke Evans holds his own as the primary baddie. Still, the script arrives at the same inevitable endpoint as any other movie about someone avenging a loved one. You know the old saying — before you embark upon a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

56. AmateurSuch is the nature of work that the employer reaps far more reward from labor than the employee, but enough athletes are rich that this isn’t always evident in the world of professional sports. At the tender age of 14, Terron Forte (Michael Rainey Jr.) learns this the hard way as he nearly succeeds himself into indentured servitude. Terron leaves his fellow middle schoolers in the dust on the basketball court, and before long, a coach (Josh Charles) from an elite private academy headhunts him for their team. All that glitters is not gold, however; Coach works Terron to the bone for zero pay while breeding him as an NCAA prospect, so much so that Terron can’t take advantage of the tuition-free classes that convinced him to attend in the first place. Writer-director Ryan Koo’s scrupulously researched defense of player’s rights — that is, the rights of the working class — scores more reliably than the boilerplate sports-saga bits, however. Koo misses the three, but sinks the layup.

55. Win It AllA degenerate gambler (Jake Johnson) agrees to do one of his shadier buddies a simple favor: hold on to a sealed bag for the nine months the guy’s going to spend in prison, in exchange for a cool ten grand once he gets back. The rest of the movie writes itself: Of course he looks in the bag, of course it’s money, of course he uses that money to gamble, of course he loses it and gets himself into dangerous debt just as his pal’s come to collect, and of course he can only square himself up with one last big score. The grainy 16mm photography of the grittier streets of Chicago is a pleasure unto itself and Johnson plays the hangdog down-on-his-luck type with a lived-in believability, but still, you’ve all but seen the whole thing in the first ten minutes.

54. Steel RainJapanese anxiety over the devastation of the atomic bomb gave us Godzilla, and now the ongoing nuclear tensions between North and South Korea have yielded this jittery, paranoid missile thriller. Evidently unconcerned about provoking an international incident, Yang Woo-seok extrapolates a near future in which a political destabilization triggers a back-and-forth in bombs rendered with an orgy of computer-generated ‘splosions. A sick thrill it may be, but the devil-may-care subject material can’t support the proselytizing about the spirit of unity that concludes the film, especially not when Yang takes a smugly condescending attitude to North Koreans and their plight. You can extend a bridge to the survivors of dictatorship or make fun of their janky cell phones, but it’s poor form to do both at the same time.

53. The DiscoveryIn the vast gulf between conception and execution, we have this down-tempo thought experiment from Charlie McDowell. In a world where Robert Redford has conclusively proven the existence of an idyllic afterlife, the suicide rate has mushroomed. Jason Segel and Rooney Mara are strangers with a mysterious attraction and conflicting opinions about what to do with this frightening new frontier. The kernel of an idea at the center of this film is sound, but it’s buried under several layers of metaphysical b.s. and hackneyed twists. The most compelling philosophical query posed by this film is whether Rooney Mara can make bleach-blonde hair work for her, to which the answer is of course “yes.”

52. MindhornDuring the ’80s, actor Richard Thorncroft protected the Isle of Man during his multi-season tenure as Mindhorn, a TV detective with a bionic eye that enabled him to “see the truth” via infrared lie-detection. In this daft laugher from across the pond, Julian Barratt plays the washed-up Thorncroft in the present day, as he shills his way through middle-age in humbling commercial spots. He gets a shot at redemption when a homicidal maniac demands the police put him in contact with the real Mindhorn, and much to the displeasure of his real-cop partners, Thorncroft gets back into character. The heavy ratio of jokes-per-minute means that even those that fall flat don’t necessarily kill the film, and most of them do work. (Steve Coogan is an egotistic treat as Thorncroft’s old castmate.) All the same, there’s a problem when a viewer would rather watch an episode of the ersatz Mindhorn than the movie itself.

51. BarryBarack Obama is the coolest commander-in-chief to have ever graced the Oval Office — this is fact. Vikram Gandhi’s chronicle of Obama’s swingin’ college years at Columbia confirms that much, showing the man who would be president as he plays basketball, smokes the occasional joint, and charms a politically engaged coed (Anya Taylor-Joy). Gandhi doesn’t go quite as hard on the prophetic rise-of-a-leader portentousness as rival Obama biopic Southside With You, instead focusing on the young man’s feeling of placelessness. A Chicagoan in New York, a mixed-race kid in Harlem, a street-smart student among the academic elites, Obama’s shown to wrestle with insecurity and self-consciousness. Remember back when those were qualities the president had?

5o. 6 BalloonsDrug addicts tend to compartmentalize when they first get started, keeping their life and their vice as separate as possible. This two-hander drama is situated at the inevitable point where sickness bleeds over into the more meaningfully personal — friends, romantic relationships, family. Abbi Jacobson puts on a serious face as Katie, feeling conflicted about her brother Seth (Dave Franco) when it starts to look like he’s relapsed. Over the course of one evening, grueling even at a brief 71 minutes, she goes from tough-love counselor to enabler as she helps Seth score to keep him from dying of withdrawal. Both Jacobson and Franco are up to the task, never coming off as tourists in the genre like so many comedic actors stretching their range, and the ending is a lot darker than they play it. All the more frustrating, then, that the script would hamstring their work with such missteps as easy symbolism, voice-over overload, and crucial lines that ring false.

49. Our Souls at NightI showed my grandmother Brooklyn in 2015, after which she smiled and said, “That’s the best kind of movie — I call them ‘nice’ movies.” Here’s another “nice” movie, and that’s not a diss, either. Anyone over the age of 60 will most likely be charmed by this softly told romance between seniors-who-still-got-it Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, but everyone can share in the warmth this sweet-natured, if mild, film radiates. Adult children Judy Greer and Matthias Schoenaerts bring trouble into their geriatric Eden, but the prevailing tone is that of comfort.

48. Step SistersThe Bring It On series, the clear antecedent to this dance flick (which is, mercifully, far superior to Dance Flick), kept considerations of class and race in the mix through its many installments. But Charles Stone III’s film foregrounds the matter, challenging a black step expert (Megalyn Echikunwoke) to whip a white sorority into shape before a big competition so our girl can make it into Harvard Law, which, sure. The choreography cuts the mustard and then some — Stone’s an old pro in the music-video world, and it shows — but the film takes more interest in decoding the tangled implications of cultural appropriation, sometimes laboriously so. If a movie’s going to be obvious and didactic, the least it can do is be obvious and didactic in the service of a positive ideology, and everybody’s down to get woke at Westcott University. (Note: A supporting performance from Matt McGorry as a semi-self-aware, even more intolerable version of his already intolerable self instantly validates the casting.)

47. CalibreThe forbidding Scottish highlands provide a spooky backdrop for a back-to-basics horror movie — of sorts. A pair of lads working the classic yin and yang of manliness (one rips lines of coke and chases skirt, the other is a dutiful husband to a pregnant wife) go out for a hunting holiday in the untamed U.K. wilds and have a tragic accident. They then stack a few bad choices on top of an honest mistake, until they’ve trapped themselves in an iron maiden of lies calling to mind Poe’s tell-tale heart. Shame runs both men through a wringer of remorse, accentuated by the disconnect between their city manners and the decency of their country-folk hosts. This adventure isn’t all that adventurous, but strong acting and a setting that a viewer can get lost in (cue ominous pipe organ chord) prop up the rest of the film.

46. ARQMake no mistake, this conceptual sci-fi picture is made mostly out of pure mumbo jumbo, but it’s still an exceptionally high grade of mumbo jumbo. In the opening moments, a scientist wakes up beside his ex-lover. Masked men storm into their room a moment later, drag them into the basement, demand a huge payoff, and kill our man when he tries to escape. He then reawakens and begins the cycle anew, setting off a twisty logic puzzle tricked out with killer robots, glowing insignia tattoos, and a perpetual-motion machine capable of resetting time. (But only within highly specific parameters.) (And the time loops group together into larger loop clusters that then also loop themselves, but only if — you know what, just don’t worry about it.) It is a Groundhog Day–Primer bastardization full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It has its fun with the sound and fury, though.

45. Alex StrangeloveThe Skeleton Twins director Craig Johnson summons the ghost of John Hughes for this sweet if anodyne lark about a high schooler grappling with big questions about his sexual identity. Pretty-faced Alex Truelove (Daniel Doheny) likes his girlfriend Claire (Madeline Weinstein, who runs away with the movie) just fine, but for some reason, he can’t find the motivation to deflower her. Compounding this confusion is Elliott (Antonio Marziale), a soulful college freshman that Alex can’t stop thinking about. Everyone ends up right where they belong, a millennial happily-ever-after of free tolerance and self-discovery without torment. Whether a viewer finds this a pleasing change of pace from a queer cinema steeped in the tragic or an overly slight sanitizing of an emotionally intense process will be a matter of personal preference.

44.War MachineSo many films on this list faltered due to bad ideas, but David Michôd’s war picture is the only entry that overcommits to too many good ones. Hiding in the story of General Stanley McChrystal’s ill-fated occupation of Afghanistan (fictionalized here as Glen McMahon by Brad Pitt, with the proud chin, slick hairdo, and can-do attitude of a Global War on Terror Ken doll), there’s a stirring meditation on America’s quagmire in the Middle East, a riotous satire about American exceptionalism coming to a bitter end, and a character study about one incompetent man on a tragic mission to prove himself. Michôd attempts to do all three at once and overextends himself, resulting in distracting gear shifts between scenes that could easily be ironed out into a fine picture.

43. Fullmetal AlchemistIt is my understanding that if a viewer sits down to watch this CGI-heavy live-action movie having even the slightest affinity for the original anime series, they’ll be intimately disappointed. But because this critic had zero outside knowledge going in, he was largely pleased to find an off-the-wall pre-viz extravaganza of inspired computerized nonsense. In the future, Europe will be populated by Asians dressed like they’re on their way to a particularly prestigious fan convention, some of whom possess the ability to convert matter at will. Two such “alchemists” — our hero Ed (Ryosuke Yamada) and his brother (Atomu Mizuishi), whose soul has been placed in a gigantic robot for safe-keeping — go searching for the Macguffin from the first Harry Potter, besting a menagerie of vivid fantasy beasties as they go. I will not deny that it’s pretty dumb, but at long last, my wish for a feature conducting its entire self at the fever pitch of Geoffrey Rush battling a slug made of clouds in Gods of Egypt has come true.

42. Love Per Square FootQuarters are cramped in India, exponentially more so in metropolitan areas. Karina and Sanjay (Angira Dhar and Vicky Kaushal) are more than ready to get out of their respective parents’ houses, and decide to jointly enter a lottery for a 500-square-foot flat in Mumbai — only catch is, they’ve got to pretend to be married if they want to be considered. Brace for hijinks! A fizzy takeoff on The Proposal trading immigration difficulties for real-estate woes, it’s an inoffensive and upbeat way to spend [checks watch] two hours and 15 minutes?! Bloated run time aside, this film’s simple joys will make an American audience wonder why Hollywood has all but stopped making this profoundly comforting kind of movie: the unhip, un-improvised, un-self-aware rom-com.

41. Small CrimesAfter buying one man’s self-debasement with the deranged Cheap Thrills in 2013, director E.L. Katz came back meaner than ever with another black comedy pushing a well-intentioned guy’s moral fiber to the breaking point. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau mounts a convincing argument for himself as a bona fide movie star with his turn as former corrupt policeman Joe Denton, struggling to stay on the straight and narrow while reentering society following a prison stint. The mere presence of Macon Blair (who also co-wrote the film) signals an enticing mix of gallows laughs and somber small-town crime drama, not too far removed from the films of Jeremy Saulnier and Blair’s own directorial debut — see below. But where those films were well-served by simple, leaner scripts, this one spirals out in its many knots of plot. With so many diverting characters, such as Gary Cole as a cop on the take who sees murder as a first and second resort, this could’ve thrived with a more minimal slice-of-life approach.

4o. Girlfriend’s DayBob Odenkirk does some damn fine work in this black comedy as Ray, an out-of-work greeting-card writer so numbed by depression that he has to watch bum-fight DVDs just to feel something. Odenkirk skillfully navigates through an obstacle course of genres and tones, as his Garden State–ish melancholia mercifully gives way to a noir-inflected mystery that links skinheads, Stacy Keach, a ring of jailhouse murders, and a newly contrived holiday with suitable ridiculousness. The desaturated color scheme used to telegraph Ray’s bummed-out state of mind wears on the nerves after a few scenes, but that’s the sort of misstep a viewer forgives when the rest of the film — deft casting, writing that knows when to pull back — functions as it should.

39. 7 AñosThe bad news is that this drama engages in the cardinal sin of chess metaphors, my number-one writerly pet peeve. The good news is that the rest of it is smart enough that we can fairly expect more. The Dardenne brothers would nod in approval at this black-box piece’s doozy of a premise: Four friends, all partners in a business facing some nasty tax-fraud charges, must agree on who among them shall take the fall for the crime. Their bitter deliberations over who’s to play scapegoat unearth longer-simmering resentments and tease out the personal dynamics between these sparingly traced characters with rigorous economy. (At a svelte 77 minutes and limited to a single room, it’s begging to be mounted as a play.) Incidentally, this Spanish-language import marked Netflix’s first foreign purchase, a key step on the road to complete global domination.

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38. Deidra and Laney Rob a TrainThere’s a good deal to like about this plucky crime comedy, even if director Sydney Freeland never ties it together into a fully satisfying, cohesive package. A pair of young sisters (Ashleigh Murray and Rachel Crow) need money for legal fees when their mother lands in the big house, dad’s nowhere to be found, and they don’t have a whole lot of options. So when a train all but rolls up and begs to be plundered, what are Deirdra and Laney supposed to do? Freeland’s still getting her sea legs as a director, but she has a keen understanding of American poverty and how it forces those affected by it into undesirable situations out of necessity. It is, first and foremost, an empathetic film.

37. Roxanne RoxanneIt all should’ve gone down like this: After Chanté Adams won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance for her ferocious portrayal of proto-hip-hop teen queen Roxanne Shanté, then this serviceable biopic should’ve gotten a summer release and launched the career of a new star. By now, Adams would be slated for a Marvel movie in 2021 and an Oscar nomination by 2025. But a quiet online release from Netflix over a year later buried the film, and with it, a star-making turn fraught with the kind of vulnerability and dynamic confidence that can’t be taught. While the film is a mixed bag altogether — Mahershala Ali does fine work as Roxanne’s older, abusive boyfriend, though his oily charms have to counteract the dully direct dialogue — the leading performance can stand up to independent scrutiny.

36. The Polka KingIn 2004, a Polish immigrant by the name of Jan Lewan was arrested for masterminding a Ponzi scheme with receipts that ran into the millions. The bizarre account of his road to that moment lays a strong foundation for this zippy comedy about a lunge at the American dream that ends in a belly flop. Jack Black sinks his incisors into the role of the perpetually upbeat Lewan as an opportunity to do what he does best — namely, a funny voice and rock star-lite strutting during the whirlwind polka numbers. Diverting supporting turns from Jenny Slate as Jan’s homegrown beauty-queen wife and Jason Schwartzman as his harried right-hand man very nearly compensate for the often-clumsy application of commentary on National Themes.

35. MaktubA brush with death has a way of putting the zap on a guy. Partners-in-crime Chuma and Steve (Israeli comedy duo Guy Amir and Hanan Savyon) resolve to change their gangster ways after pure coincidence leaves them the sole survivors of a terrorist attack at a restaurant, but getting out of the game is never that simple. They want a second act as “guardian angels” granting the wishes wary souls write on scraps of paper and jam in the Wailing Wall. Their associates, naturally, have other notions. Israel provides fertile ground for crime-comedy in a film that tussles with moral queries while working the same wry vibe as HBO’s Barry. Amir and Savyon get away with their dicier hot-button writing on merit of their well-honed rapport, keeping everyone too busy laughing to tell whether or not the film is blithely problematic.

34. ManhuntJohn Woo, he of the doves and indoor sunglasses and brain-melting gun fu spectaculars, came to Netflix to peddle his latest bullet-strewn dance of death. The master plays the hits with a crime opus harkening back his more widely beloved work from the ‘90s, with all the slow-mo insanity that that assessment implies. He brings his usual hyperkinetic style to the pursuit between a fugitive and the monomaniacally driven man on his trail, the action sequences as likely to inspire whiplash as the wild, out-of-nowhere vacillations to comedy and romance. But even if a viewer with an affinity for Woo’s work sees his technique here as a refreshing return to form instead of an artistic regression, the director falls back on his bad habits as well, losing interest in the story he’s telling once the bodies go flying.

33. DudeThey’re a different breed, Los Angeles high schoolers — even the upstanding students cut class, cross items off the ol’ sexual bucket list, and habitually get high. (Sometimes even with parental consent!) Four such specimens (Awkwafina, Lucy Hale, Kathryn Prescott, and Alexandra Shipp, all well into their 20s) make the emotional odyssey through the end of their senior year in this chill-sesh of a film, trading allusion-heavy quips between hits from a bong in the shape of a gorilla’s head. Updating Clueless for the age of normalized vaping, the girls handle the hurdles of boys, parental units, and their inevitable separation with a distinctly modern candor. On a few different occasions, this film actually puts the horniness-money of Blockers where its mouth is.

32. A Futile and Stupid GestureHaving already turned the tired tropes of the summer camp flick and the rom-com inside out, it looked like virtuoso parodist David Wain was set to lay waste to the biopic with his treatment of the life and times of National Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney (Will Forte). While Wain and his merry band of comedy geeks have their fun paying tribute to the preceding generation, in particular Thomas Lennon as living time bomb Michael O’Donoghue, it all melts into the same old sentimentalism by the end. Forte plays Kenney as a figure of self-destructive tragedy and Domhnall Gleeson provides the superego to his id as co-founder Henry Beard, but the script forces both men to be stock figures in a hidebound rise-and-fall routine.

31. 1922Killing is easy; it’s the living with it afterward that’s hard. The same truth that informed Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart takes on grimy new life in this solid adaptation of a Stephen King novella, the gnawing corrosion of guilt an eternal constant whether in the present, Poe’s era, or the pre–Dust Bowl plains. It’s there that a proud, stubborn farmer (Thomas Jane) hatches a plot with his semi-willing son (Dylan Schmid) to murder his wife (Molly Parker) when she makes plans to divorce him and sell her half of the family farm. The horrifying visions that then plague him amount to a sumptuous buffet of terror (trigger warning: so many rats), but the original text simply doesn’t provide enough story material to sustain a 101-minute feature without padding. Director Zak Hilditch puts the text he has through its paces, but a viewer still walks away with that haute cuisine dissatisfaction: It was great and everything, but such small portions!

30. The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer HunterFrom psycho mall cops to deluded martial arts instructors, director Jody Hill has an unending fascination with men imprisoned by their own fragile masculinity. As homemade hunting-video star Buck Ferguson, Josh Brolin is a bit more dialed back than the testosterone-fueled nutjobs usually portrayed for Hill by Danny McBride (appearing here as Buck’s cameraman/whipping boy), but he still buries his tender little heart under several layers of leather and sheet-rock. He’s stung when his young son reveals that Mama’s getting re-married following her divorce from Buck, and kicks the forced parent-kid bonding into high gear in an attempt to win back his boy and, symbolically, his balls. Hill fans may be disappointed to find that his latest feature lacks the maniacal edge of Observe and Report and his small-screen work, but neophytes may appreciate the down-the-middle palatability in the father-son bond.

29.I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the HouseOz Perkins established himself as an important new name in horror filmmaking when this staid ghost story and his girls’-school-set chiller The Blackcoat’s Daughter got releases within five months of one another last year. You won’t find the superior film on Netflix, but that’s not to denigrate what’s still a delectable exercise in atmospheric terror. Accomplishing a good deal with very little — keep your buckets of blood, monsters, and jump scares, thanks — Perkins conjures fear from thin air. Be forewarned, however: Those viewers who complained that “nothing happened” in The Witch (which is a crazy thing to think) will start to fidget after about ten minutes of slow-burn suspense building.

28. Blame!There must have been 50 ways to go awry when adapting this popular manga series for a feature film; losing basic coherence while condensing ten volumes of writing into a 90-minute package, sacrificing the essence of the art by making kinetic what was once stationary, hiring annoying voice actors. Director Hiroyuki Seshita does the Charleston around these many pitfalls, safely emerging on the other side with a beautiful dark twisted cyberpunk fantasy. Skittering android-spider abominations and hyperspeed gun-toting rebels populate this desolate post-industrial hellscape, where a band of rebels must beat back the advance of an approaching death-bot (storytelling often takes a way back seat to immersive set dressing) with a mix of futuristic weaponry and courage. A bit typical in its band-of-heroes narrative, but never in the stylistic means employed to tell it.

27. Us and Them The chunyun period refers to the days of unusually high-density travel in China surrounding the Lunar New Year, where circumstances squeeze strangers up against one another in quarters too close for comfort. Not quite the case for Jianqing and Xiaoxiao (Jing Boran and Zhou Dongyu, respectively), who hit it off during this mad dash and begin a decade-long love affair. This soapy drama retells the story of their relationship through a series of flashbacks interwoven with visions of their joyless post-breakup present, riding the ecstatic highs of infatuation and the bleak lows of a drag-down fight. While the dialogue used to express this trajectory often leans to the trite, the outsized extremes of feeling — full-body sobs, declarations of undying devotion — shine through undeterred.

26. WheelmanCollateral on the phone, Locke but with crime — we’ve no shortage of comparison points for this innovative action B-flick, but that’s not to detract from director Jeremy Rush’s own bright ideas. His first and best was tapping macho man Frank Grillo for the lead, a getaway driver taken hostage via phone and forced to run a series of increasingly hazardous jobs during one unending night. The second was constraining the camera to our man’s car for the entirety of the film, trapping the audience in the predicament right next to him. It’s a supremely unsettling effect, putting us close enough to the violence to see it clearly, even close enough to feel threatened by it, but not quite close enough to intervene. Like Grillo, we’re powerless, but at least he’s got the brass balls and five o’clock shadow to take a shot at reclaiming his life. Grillo’s in top form here, leveling up and acting as the major-league name-taker we all knew he could be.

25. PsychokinesisAt long last, a superhero movie that doesn’t take itself so gosh-darn seriously. Korea’s Yeon Sang-ho (who recently compressed a full-scale zombie invasion into the length of a locomotive with the high-grade pandemonium of Train to Busan) sees the inherent silliness in an ordinary schmo spontaneously developing powers, and embraces a broad slapstick sensibility in a wholly atypical entry for the genre. Our man Seok-heon (Ryu Seung-ryong) is more of a Paul Blart than a Bruce Wayne, lacking in playboy billionaire status, a rippling physique, and even a sound moral code. He mostly uses his telekinetic skills to get back in his estranged daughter’s good graces and upend capitalism — my hero! — and even then, Yeon refuses to grant his character any stony-faced gravitas. Not everything has to be the end of the universe.

24. MascotsTen years after his last foray into long-form mockumentary, Christopher Guest returns to his wheelhouse with another inspection of a peculiar subculture as likely to induce squirms of discomfort as laughter. A collection of weirdos played by Guest’s usual gang of goofballs (Jane Lynch, Parker Posey, Fred Willard, you know the lot) convene for a world-class mascot tomfoolery competition, cue magnificently uncomfortable improv. While not as conceptually involved as the constantly shifting For Your Consideration, it’s sure to delight those who were delighted by Guest’s past shenanigans, a camp of which this critic is a proud member. Newcomer Zach Woods, by the by, walks away with the MVP honors. There’s a gentle quiver in his voice when he mutters, “Do you prescribe antidepressants?” That quiver is art.

23. Layla M.If you’re looking for a finely shaded perspective on the spread of terrorism in the Middle East with a functional understanding of intersectionality, you’re going to have to leave America. From the Netherlands comes this politically minded character piece about a young woman (Nora El Koussour) chafing under Islamophobia while living among the Dutch, and how that tension drives her to radical extremes. But when Layla relocates to Jordan with her Jihadist husband, she’s disappointed to find that a rigid patriarchy still won’t allow for her to enjoy a fuller extent of freedom. Lending her fellow woman an empathetic ear, director Mijke de Jong organically contrasts these two strains of oppression to expose the difficulty that women of color have in finding a place of their own wedged between white and male violence.

22. The Skin of the Wolf Samu Fuentes’ Spanish-language folktale moves with a raw, primal energy that puts it closer to a violent Old World creation myth than a child’s fable. Fur trapper Martinon (Mario Casas) lives alone in the woods; press notes clarify that it’s the early 19th century, but judging by what little Fuentes shows of civilization, the story could very well take place when the Earth was young. (That the film passes with only a handful of words spoken aloud reinforces this elemental mood.) He decides to take a wife to assuage some of the self-imposed loneliness, though the union they form more closely resembles animalistic pack mentality than matrimony. There’s not much more to it than that, told at a glacial pace with eye-wideningly gorgeous photography of the natural vistas of Spain. While not the most instantly pleasurable sit, this modern silent film succeeds where The Light Between Oceans most recently failed, linking the birth of a family unit to something deeper and older than its composite members.

21. I Don’t Feel at Home in This World AnymoreThis is how it’s done, Shimmer Lake. Macon Blair works from a decidedly Coen-esque template in his directorial debut, but invests enough of his own idiosyncrasies into the story of two oddballs (a fed-up Melanie Lynskey and slightly unhinged, nunchuck-brandishing Elijah Wood) on the ineptly charted warpath for this to feel like a beast all its own. There’s a rickety punk energy to Blair’s indie-scaled production style and, moreover, the fuck-the-world frustration that drives Lynskey’s character to the edge after her house gets plundered. Blair more than earned the top prize he picked up at Sundance — though you’d never learn that from Netflix, which unceremoniously released the picture weeks after it was deemed the toast of America’s biggest independent film festival.

20.Gerald’s GameA premise so simple and brilliant, you wonder why no one’s ever tried it before: A couple retreats to a secluded cabin, hoping to give their flagging marriage a shot in the arm with a sexy weekend excursion. But when he handcuffs her to the bed and promptly dies of a heart attack, she has to draw on all her ingenuity and confront some personal demons to take one last grasp at life. (The 127 Hours comparison is hard not to make, though Stephen King wrote the novel on which this is based long beforehand.) Maybe Hollywood was waiting for two actors as game as Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood, put through their paces and then some in a hallucinatory night of the soul that dislodges some dark repressed memories and reorients their present. At least for performers, this all-in two-hander is worthy of study like Scripture.

19.CargoDirectors Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke have done their zombie homework, drawing smartly from a long cinematic heritage while introducing a sufficient number of new innovations to distinguish themselves from their flesh-hungry forebears. Chief among them is a move away from the survival-story template common to the genre; our man Martin Freeman has been infected, he’s going to die, and he’s got 48 hours left to find some measure of safety for the infant (and, later, Aboriginal foundling) in his charge. Far from diminishing the tension, the plot’s inevitability adds a sort of tragic poetry to a final, futile grasp at hope for the next generation following an acceptance that the current one is doomed. And there’s the true hallmark of the good zombie flick — a subtext that can be projected onto whatever timely concern a viewer chooses.

18. Sand StormHormones a-raging, a girl crushes hard on a boy and they strike up a secret relationship away from the disapproving eye of her traditionalist father. In Elite Zexer’s volatile feature debut, this tale as old as time is heightened by a new resonance when imposed onto a Bedouin community living in Israel’s Negev Desert. “Melodrama” doesn’t have to be a naughty word with emotional displays this fiery — between our gal Layla (Lamis Ammar) and her mother (Ruba Blal-Asfour) when the cat gets out of the bag, between Mom and Dad (Hitham Omari) when he humiliates her by taking a younger second wife, to say nothing of the figurative war of words between Layla and the harshly repressive society frowning on her unchecked energy. Parents, as ever, just don’t understand.

17. Before I WakeImages lodge themselves in our memories during the tender developmental years, twisting and warping and growing in size to ghastly proportions as they lurk in the subconscious. This bedtime-story chiller from Mike Flanagan demonstrates a deeper understanding of this concept than most horror films fishing in the shallow waters of pop-psych. A well-meaning couple (Tom Jane and Kate Bosworth) take in an adorable 8-year-old foster son (Jacob Tremblay) after their child drowns in the bathtub. Little do they know that the new tot’s dreams spring to life as he slumbers, which is a lot more fun when rainbow butterflies stream out of his brain than when he unleashes a gaunt ghoul known as “the Cankerman.” It’s an inverted Nightmare on Elm Street, with a script more intellectually curious about how dreams transmute fear.

16. Catching FeelingsAh, yes, here’s the South African takeoff on Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash that you were waiting for. Both films disrupt a stagnating relationship with the introduction of a high-living interloper, and to director-writer-star Kagiso Lediga’s credit, he has a slightly better go at weaving in uncomfortable racial politics to an acerbic anti-romance. He plays a touchy professor whose marriage gets a shot in the arm when a literary celebrity (Andrew Buckland, exuding a lust for life) comes to town and riles everything — and everyone — up. Bourgeois pretension and middle-aged fretting over virility follows as Lediga picks apart a man torn between his solidarity with a people in poverty and the comfortable existence of an academic. While not all that quotable, the one-liners still work as the mortar holding this grown-up movie about grown-ups together.

15.Pee-Wee’s Big HolidayEternal man-boy Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) stages his comeback in a more welcoming world, where the internet and its bolstering of cult fandoms has freed Reubens to go cheekier and weirder. The homoerotic undertones nearly broach the surface like a majestic humpback whale when Pee-Wee befriends Joe Manganiello and sets out on a cross-country odyssey to attend the ruggedly handsome actor’s birthday party. Reubens tosses in more winks to the kitsch-heads than ever, peaking with an interlude in which Pee-Wee crosses paths with a girl gang right out of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! that includes Alia Shawkat and Stephanie Beatriz. And to think they put this in the Kids & Family section …

14. Journey to GreenlandIt’s treacherous narrative territory, the micro-genre of “white person(s) go to a foreign land and have a transformative experience with the kindly locals,” but Sébastien Betbeder traverses it with respect and delicacy. A pair of slacker actors both named Thomas (Thomas Blanchard and Thomas Scimeca) make a trek to the icy expanses of the Inuit village Kullorsuaq, where the indigenous residents welcome them with open arms. Instead of treating the hospitality as an invitation to get their Eat Pray Love on, Thomas and Thomas have the presence of mind to shut up and do more listening than talking. While their experiences sometimes touch on hidebound clichés about native peoples’ fabled connection to the spiritual plane, Betbeder doesn’t force any contrived epiphanies, and what’s more, he works the breathtaking Greenlandian scenery for all it’s worth.

13. Beasts of No NationNetflix started strong with their first release, a muscular and intense coming-of-age narrative that doubles as a uniquely brutal war film. Though Idris Elba was the presumed award horse for his layered turn as an African warlord (snubbed by the Oscars in the year that precipitated the #OscarsSoWhite pushback), newcomer Abraham Attah racked up the most hardware for his harrowing lead performance. Weathering the slaughter of his family, forced enrollment in a child army, constant drugging, and a host of other traumas, Attah fights with all he’s got to maintain one last semblance of humanity. In this way, it’s almost a story of anti-maturation; As Elba grooms him to be a ruthless killing machine, Attah desperately clings to his remaining scraps of childhood. Shot in immersive yet never ostentatious long takes by director Cary Fukunaga, the film heralded a future for Netflix that hasn’t quite come to pass. Films like this were supposed to be the norm — instead, they ended up the glaring exception.

12.The Little PrinceDirector Mark Osborne has devised a rather brilliant method of communicating the transportive quality of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s poignant fantasy novella. A frame story featuring an aged aviator and an inquisitive little moppet has been rendered in 3D computer-animation, and the pilot’s memories of his past with the melancholic prince are all stop-motion. Otherwise, Osborne plays it smart (if a bit safe) and sticks with the source material, relaying all the pocket profundities about compassion for our fellow homo sapiens and the unstoppable passage of time. I’d highly recommend it for parents unsure how to go about teaching their children the ABC’s of decency, and for adults, it’s pretty amusing that these philosophical fables occasionally come out of the mouths of Paul Rudd or James Franco.

11. TrampsOn the grand spectrum of movies about kids falling in love over the course of one long day spent scrambling around New York, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist sits at one pole of quality and this superior indie from Adam Leon occupies the other. Danny and Elle (Callum Turner and Grace Van Patten, the latter the clear standout) first cross paths as accomplices on a cut-and-dried bag-drop-off job with a big payout. There’s no movie if it goes according to plan, so naturally Danny leaves the asset with a perfect stranger, and they embark on a quirky but not too quirky odyssey to get it back. Leon hits an elusive sweet spot, giving us all the things audiences love about small-scale romances — clever leads, hip street cred, offbeat dialogue — without ever overplaying that hand. It makes you want to get on a train and return a cute stranger’s smile.

10. Sunday’s IllnessThere’s a ghostly poeticism to this Spanish-language symbolist tale of a difficult reunion between mother and child: chilly long takes composed to within an inch of their life, stanzas that float by without a word spoken aloud, a plot that hinges almost entirely on what goes unsaid and unshown. Wealthy, content Anabel (Susi Sanchez) starts to fall through the cracks in her seemingly ideal life when Chiara (Barbara Lennie) appears during a dinner party and claims to be the daughter she abandoned at the ripe age of eight. Chiara wants only to spend ten days bonding with the mother she never knew, a peculiar request made even more suspicious by Chiara’s insistence on signing contracts with legal counsel present. The eventual revelation of her game would be shocking on its own, but it’s all the more impactful thanks to the meticulously assembled waking dreams preceding it.

9. RavenousCanada puts its maple-leaf-emblazoned national stamp on the zombie thriller, and for a movie about the walking dead, it’s got a lot of brains. A plague of the undead descends on a Quebecois suburb, but the attackers are a bit more developed than the supercharged people-eaters of 28 Days Later or George Romero’s lethargic saunterers. They follow strange and inexplicable patterns, gathering and obsessively placing household objects in towering stacks that they then worship when not gnawing the flesh off of shinbones. Filmmaker Robin Aubert has stated that he conceived their behavior and spread as an allegory for the stormy political climate of rural French-Canada, defined by cultural vacuity and separatist dissent. As a Canadian New Wave gains momentum, Aubert does right by his countrymen with an auto-critical polemic that succeeds on the terms of its sensationalist genre as well.

8.First They Killed My FatherThe reports of director Angelina Jolie’s unorthodox casting methods raised concerns that the vocal activist might not grasp the big picture of her sensitive topic — the Cambodian genocides under Khmer Rouge during the ’70s — despite her noble intentions. But what a relief to find that she has indeed done right by her subject and co-writer Loung Ung, the citizens she’s come to love and protect, and the terrible burden of history’s weight. Jolie goes all-in, working almost exclusively with locals from a script in the Khmer language, steeping the account of Loung’s gutting stint in the child militias in Cambodia’s native culture. She shows admirable self-awareness in her treatment of these shattering events, refusing to shy away from the most grueling details while steering clear of exploitation. She’s erected a tribute to suffering that doesn’t wallow or look for hope where there was none. It soldiers on, survives, and leaves us the pain.

7.MudboundBehold, the rare example of the film industry functioning properly as a meritocracy. Dee Rees showed promise with her 2011 narrative feature debut Pariah, proved herself ready for a bigger platform after marshaling HBO’s resources on Bessie in 2015, and then when Hollywood gave her a bigger budget, she crushed it. This adaptation of Hillary Jordan’s sprawling novel about two families — one black, one white — locked in a racially charged culture clash in ‘40s Mississippi attempts a lot, and astonishingly enough, pulls it all off. Replicating the narrative structure of the source text, Rees freely drifts between voice-overs from six different characters. The story spans years and traffics in huge swells of emotion that never spill over into melodrama, not to mention the stunning visual set pieces in the World War II passages. The sizable ensemble interlocks perfectly, with special considerations to Mary J. Blige as a long-suffering matriarch and Garrett Hedlund as a shell-shocked veteran, but Rees is the real star of the show. This is the coronation of a vital new voice in American filmmaking.

6. On Body and SoulAt a dreary workplace, an office crush can get you through the day. Endre (Géza Morcsányi) and Mária (Alexandra Borbély) make their daily wage at a slaughterhouse where the unyielding stench of death in the air is enough to make you vomit, and accordingly, the bond between them runs deeper than petty romance. At night, they meet in dreams as a buck and a deer, neither fully aware of what this surreal communion means. Hungary’s pride and joy Ildikó Enyedi took home the top prize at the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival along with a slew of other awards (including an Oscar nomination) for her lyrical, penetratingly sad look at the indomitable power of love to sustain us through even the harshest trials. The first kernel of an idea would’ve been an overly precious MFA short story reject in the hands of a more literal-minded artist, but Ildikó leaves enough interpretive fog around the edges of her work to pull the gambit off.

5. Set It UpCould it be true? The most generously enjoyable romcom of the past decade is hiding on Netflix? Not that there’s a whole lot of competition, but TV veteran Claire Scanlon’s first foray into feature directing is still an effervescent reminder of why Hollywood used to crank out, like, five of these things per year. Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell have atomic-level chemistry as the beleaguered assistants to a pair of horrible bosses (Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs, having a ball), Tituss Burgess plays a character named “Creepy Tim,” there’s a cutaway joke involving a Magic Mike XXL-themed science project, and it successfully resurrects the tired old “it’s almost like New York City is a character in the film!” thing. As with all of the genre’s best entries, Scanlon makes it all look so easy, and makes us wonder why the irony-free romantic comedy has fallen into such disrepair.

4. DivinesFrench-Moroccan first-timer Houda Benyamina only needed to scale her family tree to find a magnetic leading actress, tapping younger sister Oulaya Amamra for the reckless, hungry hooligan Dounia. Anyone can tap into Dounia’s claustrophobia in her dead-end Romani community as well as her first exhilarating taste of life beyond it, which makes her tailspin into turpitude so disarmingly personal. Determined to make more money than the chumps on her block, Dounia and her right-hand gal Maimouna (Déborah Lukumuena) get their feet in the door of the neighborhood drug trade, only to be crushed at the ankle. The girls go through the customary tests and failures of adolescence, but they live in a climate where a young woman can’t always afford to fail. Benyamina’s closely attuned to both her actresses as well as their characters — a discernibly female perspective with a gaze that adores and occasionally objectifies the male body, and that looks toward the future with an honest world-weariness.

3. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)Just when the words “new Netflix movie starring Adam Sandler” had assumed synonymity with low quality, Noah Baumbach swooped out of his Brooklyn brownstone to redeem them. Sandler’s rage-choked man-child schtick takes on new depth and poignancy in the context of one big, fractious, dysfunctional New York family. After a lifetime of getting underestimated and ignored by his esteemed sculptor dad (Dustin Hoffman), Sandler and half-siblings portrayed by Elizabeth Marvel (an office drone for Xerox) and Ben Stiller (a successful business manager out in L.A., still a disappointment to Pops for following the money) act out in aggravated fits as a maladjusted assertion of independence. They laugh and fight and eke out a grain of self-actualization by the end credits, survivors of an oppressive household regime built on passive-aggression and guilt.

2.My Happy FamilyHaving a steady job as a teacher and an income to go with it, 52-year-old Manana (Ia Shugliashvili) can afford to abdicate her duties as a mother and wife to go live alone, where she’s beholden only to herself. The social and psychological costs of her effort to engineer a late-in-life new beginning, however, total out to a much higher sum. In this superb drama co-directed by Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß, long takes rolling on for minutes at a time give Manana and the people in her immediate orbit space to reveal their inner workings through the naturalistic, sometimes awkward language of gestures and implication. Manana communicates with her husband and children on the specialized, nonverbal frequency that families develop over time, and with a little distance, she realizes that they all wrestle with their own struggles. It’s one of those films that rightly earns a phrase so overused it now verges on meaninglessness, but all the same — it’s a movie about what it means to be human.

1. OkjaIn which Netflix and Brad Pitt’s production house Plan B jointly pony up $50 million to produce two solid hours of furious anti-capitalist agitprop from radicalized hippie Bong Joon-ho. In the most satisfying reappropriation of establishment funds sinceSnowpiercer, Bong pulled off an E.T. homage that takes a hard left turn into corporate animal slaughter that makes PETA shock pamphlets look like the WeRateDogs account. A young girl in South Korea (Ahn Seo-hyun) forms a deep-seated bond with a hippo-pig-rabbit creature known as a “super-pig,” and when the nefarious Mirando conglomerate comes to take dear sweet Okja away, the sum total of a profit-driven culture’s evil comes into focus. Bong’s not subtle, but he has no inclination to be, not in a situation he feels is this urgent. Warhol said art is whatever you can get away with; Bong’s films feel seriously, substantively subversive in a way that nothing currently coming out of the studio system does. If films freely unencumbered by hegemony are the yield of Netflix’s famously permissive attitude toward its filmmakers, I suppose I’ll renew my subscription.